“Throwing salt on wounds”: Covid-19 and a curriculum of embodiment

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic certainly amplifies the extent to which curriculum is adaptable, responsive, and proactive. These vulnerabilities, while daunting, can perhaps be welcomed as an invitation to reposition curricular priorities. Covid-19 reveals that an overreliance on the “curriculum as planned” and a continued absence of “the forgetful curriculum” will no longer suffice. The fragility of life and the sources that make life and living possible are often left out of curricular and policy imaginings. This article seeks guidance from Maulana Rumi’s story “The Graduate and the Boatman” and poem “One Task” to guide a possible reframing of a curriculum that remembers embodied knowledge and the ecological sources that unite all life forms. Embodied knowledge and ecological philosophies may offer ways to refocus curricula that can help youth to turn inward, courageously contemplate the difficult questions of life, and understand that unprecedented circumstances can be generative.